Franziska: Hi and welcome back!

Today, I‘ve got a ninja here who keeps us very organized and who also makes sure that we have an up-to-date operations manual.

I thought the way that we run our operations manual here is very effective and so I asked Aga if she can maybe share a little bit of the behind the scenes of how we run our operations manual. Do you want to share some of our secret ninja strategies?

Aga: Yes, sure. So a lot of businesses have processes that are repeated over and over again. Having an operations manual is really just a great way to have everything that you are repeatedly doing in your business in one place and running your business more efficiently.

So the reason why we have an operations manual is because we want our processes to be done exactly the same and efficiently every single time they‘re being done, no matter who‘s doing them. An operations manual is also awesome for on-boarding new team members because when we have new team, it‘s better to have a process that is recorded maybe as a video, maybe in written form to teach the new team member how to do this thing that they need to do instead of us spending time over and over again training someone new doing the process. So it really saves you a lot of time. Initially it might take you a little bit of time to record your processes, but once you‘ve done that, you can use them over and over again to train new team members.

Franziska: Yes, it‘s very effective and it‘s definitely the backbone of our business here at Basic Bananas and The Business Hood and Ocean Lovers. So, of course, what a lot of people know, operations manuals to be are this big sort of books that are written and they‘re annoying when we look at them. The way that we do it is very elegant and it‘s very effective. So, we‘re going to show you now. Aga‘s going to show the behind the scenes here on how we do operations manual and it‘s going to be pretty helpful as with your business, too.

Aga: Let‘s go have a look.

Let‘s check out Google sites. So, anyone can create a Google site. All you need is a Gmail address. So, if you don‘t have one, you can get one for free. So once you‘re in your email account, you can access Google sites either through clicking on those little dots here are the top right and it will come up in this area. Or you can just Google sites and it will come up in the search results as well.

So, once you‘re in sites, you can create a site by clicking on to the red plus button and then you are basically in and then you can do all sorts of cool things. You can add a title for your sites and then start creating pages right away. So it‘s really easy drag and drop system. You just click onto the plus button here, add new pages and then you can add all sorts of things – text, boxes, images. You can even import spreadsheets from Google Drive, for example.

So, it‘s a really easy way to build out your sites. Now, I‘d like to show you one of our process pages as an example.

So here we‘ve got one of our process pages in our operations manual and it‘s actuallya page about how to create a process in a manual. A really good way to structure your pages is to explain why something needs to be done. So how does this process fit into the bigger picture? So the person who‘s doing it knows why they‘re doing it. What needs to be done? This can be a video and/or text, for example. So, we often have videos because a lot of what we do happens on the screen. Then If you‘ve got a deadline or something like that, for example, it needs to be done within 24 hours, you can also add that on that page.

So that‘s kind of the structure that you can work with. Some folders to get started with right away that you can do, for example, could be an admin folder where you have all your logins and suppliers, and all these kinds of stuff. Then a product folder where you include processes for products and/or services. Then maybe also a team folder where you kind of describe every person‘s team role and the task that they are doing.

So that‘s basically a little glimpse behind the Google sites.

Good luck with creating your own sites. Once you get started, you will see it‘s an invaluable tool for your business. Have fun!